Sandra Shaw

Artist Statement

First, I would like to thank the creators and organizers of this exhibit for addressing the most urgent catastrohpe facing life on this planet. I live in Boise, Idaho and am a retired attorney and a current landscape painter. I also do some abstract work.

My work has focused in the past almost entirely on Idaho landscapes because I feel very connected to nature. I love the outdoors here, having walked, recreated, camped, rafted and enjoyed the outoors for many years. I love to hike in the Boise foothills and the mountain and wilderness areas around Sun Valley, Ketchum, Stanley and McCall, Idaho, among other places. However, our beautiful outdoors has been increasing ravaged by wildfires with plumes of smoke for days on end.

Over a year ago, I stopped painting landscapes for two reasons. First, I have become increasing distraught about climate change, the denial of it, and how little is being done to address it. My landscape paintings seemed increasingly irrelevant to the crisis facing us. I wanted to create art that addressed the crisis that was threatening the very environment that I had painted. I wanted to draw attention to climate change by producing something that was tied to my immediate locality and to use items that resulted from the changing climate where I lived. I chose to use burnt wood and bark that I had collected on my hikes near and around areas that had recently burned.

Secondly, I was deeply affected by paintings from the late 1930’s and early 1940’s that I saw in the Pompidou Centre Museum in Paris that addressed the horrors of Nazism head on. These artists did not bury their heads in the sand and pretend that everything would turn out fine in Nazi Germany. I literally got chills when I saw a painting by Francis Picabia called “The Adoration of the Calf”, evoking the worship of blind power, particulary in light of the political situation in the US at the time. It was then I felt the importance of political art in addressing climate change, crisis, and collapse.